OTTAWA — A strike by foreign service workers that now threatens to cripple the visa process for tens of thousands of would-be visitors, international students, temporary foreign workers and immigrants couldn’t come at a worse time, some experts suggest.

Not only is it peak travel season and a time when international students settle in for the school year, there’s concern the added pressure will also compound existing problems stemming from a plan to restructure and centralize visa processing.

As part of the 2012 budget, the federal government closed or consolidated 19 Citizenship and Immigration offices in Canada as well as 10 international offices. The department also laid off about 285 employees to reduce its overseas network and move toward an online application process that could be administered from anywhere in the world.

Administrative services were outsourced to a network of 85 visa application centres (VACs) in 38 countries, which will expand to 130 such centres in 96 countries by next year, and existing files at sites that were closing were transferred to the central office in Canada, as well as offices in New York and Los Angeles.

Other visa offices including Manila and Mexico City, which are among the 15 busiest consulates that saw visa staff walk off the job this week, also picked up the slack. With the strike, CIC is again shifting more work to Canada and other overseas offices.

Some immigration lawyers say the centralization efforts, while a good idea in the long term, resulted in longer wait times that will be exacerbated by the present labour dispute.

“It lags in New York City and L.A. because the entire inventories of the closed offices were sent to those two cities, as did the fresh intake of new files,” Vancouver lawyer and immigration policy analyst Richard Kurland said.

Had it not been for a “buggy” computer system, he added, the transition would have been “flawless” but instead, applications had to be processed the old-fashioned way and the “backlog bloomed.”

Once the kinks are worked out, he said, the new system should result in more visas being processed faster and at a lower cost.

But in the short term, he noted: “The strike may stimulate further backlog growth.”

Calgary lawyer Vance Langford has also seen wait times grow, even before the rolling strikes started in June. Two of his clients — physicians from Lebanon and Mexico with credentials in order, job offers at a new Calgary hospital and letters from the administrator explaining the urgency of the situation — have faced wait times of 120 days due to processing backlogs at the Canadian consulate in New York.

If in the U.S. on temporary permits, he said, one is now at risk of getting kicked out of the United States in the interim.

“Visa processing times, as a result of the reorganization of processing networks in the U.S. and perhaps the outsourcing of functions to VACs … have gone way up and there’s no effective communication even with legal counsel,” Langford said.

“The transition has just been extremely difficult from an end-user perspective.”

Langford also raised concerns about the role VACs play, noting some in Nigeria and Abu Dhabi, U.A.E., have been known to remove certain information, such as lawyers’ letters, from visa application packages before forwarding them to officers for a final decision.

The most egregious example of backlog woes resulting from the restructuring occurred with the closure of the Buffalo, N.Y., office and the transfer of about 10,000 files to Ottawa, many of them Quebec skilled worker applications from recent and would-be graduates from Canadian universities. As brand new applicants received visas in a matter of months, while others in the Buffalo queue were still waiting two years later, the Opposition accused officials of simply forgetting about the files after the move.

The federal government promised in December to have all the Buffalo files finalized by the end of the summer, but with a month to go, some still in the queue are running out of optimism.

“I am still waiting for my file to get processed in CIC without any results,” said Alireza Saberi, a McGill University electrical engineering graduate from Iran who submitted the federal paperwork the moment he got Quebec’s approval to enter as a skilled worker in December 2010.

“Apparently, the number of applicants has been reduced a lot, but we are still a big number.”

In the meantime, he’s turned to volunteer work as no company will hire him without his permanent residency, and he’s surviving on money borrowed from relatives.

Government officials noted they still had a month to complete the files and could not immediately provide an update on the case load.